Online Supplement to Museum Anthropology, the Journal of the Council for Museum Anthropology, a section of the American Anthropological Association

Thursday, January 05, 2017

Guest Article: 2016 Indigenous International Repatriation Conference: A Global Dialogue on “Shifting the Burden” in Museology

Written by: Blaire Topash-Caldwell*

Last fall the Association on American Indian Affairs held
the 2016 Indigenous International Repatriation Conference at Isleta Resort and
Casino in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Centering on a theme of “Shifting the
Burden,” the topics and discussions covered in this important event ranged from
viewing repatriation in terms of morality and human rights frameworks to
providing research tools and strategies for tribes to use in their engagements
with the labor intensive work of repatriation in their home nations or across international
borders. The conference was well attended by not only museum professionals, but
by state officials, tribal leaders from all over the world, Tribal Historic
Preservation Officers, policy makers, art students from the Institute of
American Indian Arts, anthropologists, tribal lawyers, elders, and even law
students from the University of New Mexico just to name a few.

I attended this conference as a volunteer.
As a result, I was not able to hear from panelists in all sessions. However, my
experience of the important dialogues taking place have largely centered on
both Native and non-Native collaboration
as well as the recognition of shared cultural and historical ethics between
tribal communities and museums, even in distant places. These entanglements are
realized in moments when Native peoples are able to effectively have agency and
voice in the development of museology around the world. One panel entitled, “Museums:
Meaningful Consultations, Ethics & Policies in International Repatriation”
provided particularly telling examples of these challenges and developments. Panelists
discussed that with the adoption of the Native American Graves Protection and
Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) and sometimes with the consultation requirements of the
National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) and the National Environmental Policy
Act (NEPA), nationally there have been important strides toward the protection
and repatriation of ancestors, ceremonial items, and other objects of cultural
patrimony. The international arena, however, is a completely different story.
Panelists discussed that not only are there limited or nonexistent legal
recourse for tribes to have their ancestors and scared objects returned to them
from other places around the world; but it is also compounded by different
cultural expectations and language barriers. One panelist, Colleen Medicine (Sault
Ste. Marie Tribe), Cultural Repatriation Specialist, shared her experiences in the
unsuccessful repatriation of an Ancestor from the Karl May Museum in Germany.
One particularly telling example of this issue comes from her story about the
trip she and tribal members took to the museum. Medicine and her colleagues
traveled to the Karl May Museums in order to explain the spiritual and material
violence the museum was causing as a result of putting our Ancestor on display.
By coincidence, during this ineffective meeting, the town outside erupted in an
exhibition of Native American “culture” with German citizens dressing up and
parading about in their debaucherized interpretations of Native North American
regalia. Medicine’s story showcases the challenges that Indigenous peoples
around the world face when their limited power and legal agency is coupled with
seemingly incompatible ethics and worldview of colonial or otherwise more
powerful nation-states.

Another example, however, shows promise
for the impact that meaningful dialogue can have in museum relations with
Indigenous communities. Marcella LeBeau (Cheyenne River Sioux), Wounded Knee
Survivors Association, told a compelling story about her
experiences repatriating a Ghost Dance shirt from the Kelvingrove Museum in
Scotland. Working with the museum and ultimately providing them with a
non-ceremonial copy of the shirt, LeBeau’s work not only resulted in the
successful return of this sacred object, but opened up creative exchange of
ideas between Native peoples and the museum. These exchanges ultimately had material
effects on the structure of Scottish cultural resource management policy and
practice such as the development of repatriation policies and protocols which
did not previously. This process of repatriation, and experiences similar to
it, are what we as both Indigenous peoples and intellectuals hope the future of
museology can be.

Rebecca Tsosie (Yaqui), Professor of Law
and Special Advisor to the Provost for Diversity and Inclusion at the University
of Arizona and James E. Rogers School of Law gave a powerful keynote address at
the conference. Contextualizing the unequal scale of power for some groups’
cultural patrimony over others, she asks (not verbatim), Do you think an
American object of national patrimony like the Constitution or the original
American flag would sit in the British Museum? Of course not! That would demand
it back; and they would get it! As the original Native nations to this land,
she argues that we deserve the same agency and power. She also pointed to the
crises of “check-the-box” style consultation of some museum professionals and
state officials while drawing parallels in her speech to the joke that
capitalist enterprises make of cultural resource protection laws. This is,
Tsosie argues, particularly problematic when large amounts of capital and
private property are in involved since these powerful and large-scale
undertakings often evade cultural resource protection laws like NEPA and NHPA. As
such, Tsosie’s passionate speech recognizes the concurrent Dakota Access
Pipeline protests (NoDAPL) when she asks what we are to do in an age when
increasingly desperate and lethal forms of natural resource extraction are not
only demolishing our Ancestors and sacred sites, but our access to clean water?
What good does consultation do when we aren’t operating within the same set of
moral obligations to Mother Earth, to our children, and to our grandchildren? Whose burden is it? Indigenous peoples
cannot carry that burden alone.

Paralleling
the issues of this event, a
field hearing was held on October 18th by the Senate Committee
on Indian Affairs at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center in Albuquerque, New
Mexico. The Committee discussed how to prevent the trafficking of Native
American objects of cultural patrimony and ceremonial items across national
borders. The office of Sen. Tom Udall (D-New Mexico) chaired the hearing and
released a comment stating that “New

Mexico is home to 23 tribes whose cultural
heritage is harmed by the theft of sacred and culturally significant objects,
and the illegal trafficking of sacred and cultural items is an issue for tribes
throughout Indian Country.” In response to this issue, Udall has sponsored a
resolution called Protect Patrimony Resolution which “condemns the theft,
illegal possession or sale, transfer, and export of tribal cultural items.”
These critical discussions in the academy, in museums, and at the policy level
all revolve around the central challenges of our time: attaining the full
actualization of the conditions of representation authority of our heritage,
the rights of our Ancestors to walk on in peace, and the shared moral imperative
we all have to each other, future generations, and Mother Earth.

*Blaire
Topash-Caldwell is an enrolled member of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians
and Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of New
Mexico. Her research focuses on environmental policy, Native American women’s
role in the protection and revitalization of local ecologies, and the role that
coalitions between non-tribal environmental agencies and Indigenous traditional
ecological knowledge holders play in the resistance of invasive resource
extraction in the Great Lakes region.

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Curator of Ethnology, Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, University of New Mexico